SUMMARY: How should Americans remember the past and confront the deep wounds of slavery? The events of recent weeks have intensified a national conversation about Confederate monuments, with calls to remove them from public spaces. William Brangham talks to Peniel Joseph of the University of Texas, W. Fitzhugh Brundage of the University of North Carolina, Pierre McGraw of the Monumental Task Committee.
SUMMARY: Georgetown University is taking an unprecedented step to respond to and apologize for its ties to slavery. The university will give special preference to applicants who are descendants of Georgetown's slaves, plans to rename a building in honor of one of the slaves and will create an institute to study slavery. For greater context, Hari Sreenivasan speaks with the MIT's Craig Steven Wilder.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): In recent years, a number of prestigious colleges and universities have had to acknowledge their past ties and history to slavery in the U.S.
Today, Georgetown University became the latest to say it will apologize for its past and take new steps. More than 200 years ago, the original Georgetown College operated plantations in Maryland that worked with slave labor. Then, in 1838, facing deep debt, a pair of priests who each served as president of Georgetown sold 272 people to help pay the bills. The slaves were sent to plantations in Louisiana.
To help atone for its past, the university announced it would give a special preference in admissions to applicants who are descendants of Georgetown's slaves. It's also renaming a building in honor of one of the slaves, erecting a public memorial, and creating an institute to study slavery and its legacy.
University president John DeGioia spoke at a news conference today.
JOHN DEGIOIA, President, Georgetown University: So many were surprised, even shocked, by the revelation of Jesuit slave-holding and the benefit we received from the 1830 sale.
As a community and as individuals, we cannot do our best work if we refuse to take ownership of such a critical part of our history. We must acknowledge it.
HARI SREENIVASAN: For a closer look at this, I'm joined from New York by Craig Steven Wilder. He's a professor of American history at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and author of “Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities.”
Mr. Wilder, put this in context for us. How crucial was this transaction of people to keep Georgetown alive?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: You know, in 1838, Georgetown sold — the president of Georgetown helped negotiate the sale of about 272 people to Louisiana.
And from what we understand, about 15 to 20 percent of the money, the proceeds, actually was used to pay down Georgetown's debts. And so I think it's actually quite crucial to the continued survival of the university.
This is about the time that the university imposed tuition for the first time. And so it was helping to meet a number of financial needs.
HARI SREENIVASAN: What about your thoughts on the university's actions today?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: I thought that the report was thorough and quite thoughtful, but the real meaning of the report — I'm cautiously optimistic — I think the real meaning of the report will get revealed over the next several years and decades, as we see Georgetown implement these promises.
And it will depend upon how fully those get institutionalized on the campus, and so that we can actually see them really get achieved.
SUMMARY: An 18-month investigation into the use of slave labor in southeast Asia to bring seafood to American restaurants and supermarkets earned the Associated Press a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Since the report was made public, more than 2,000 slaves have been freed. For more on the daring expose, Hari Sreenivasan talks to Martha Mendoza of the Associated Press.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Now a startling expose about slave labor in the world of seafood.
This week, we’re looking at some of the Pulitzer Prize winners. And the Associated Press’ 18-month-long investigation won the prize for public service. It tracked the widespread use of slave labor in Southeast Asia and how it’s part in a supply chain bringing seafood to American restaurants and supermarkets.
Fishermen were beaten and caged, and reporters even hid in the back of trucks for days to pursue the story. Since then, more than 2,000 slaves have been freed.
Martha Mendoza was part of that reporting team, and joins me now.
Martha, what was the catalyst for the investigation in the first place? Unfortunately, we have heard of slave-like conditions in different parts of the world before. What made you want to follow this?
MARTHA MENDOZA, Associated Press: Well, Slavery at sea wasn’t a secret, but the stories that were being told came from rescued slaves.
And, therefore, there was no traction because the response was, these guys are safe. There is not really a problem anymore. So, we set out to do what some people warned us was going to be impossible. We wanted to find captive slaves, and then we wanted to track their catch with detailed accuracy all the way back to the dinner table to get people who were at the other end of this supply chain engaged.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So, how do you find the captive slaves in the first place?
MARTHA MENDOZA: My colleagues spoke at length and for many months with people who had escaped, as well as human rights activists who worked with people who had escaped.
And they had some miss, going to places where this wasn’t happening or false leads. But when they heard about this island in Indonesia called Benjina, they had a pretty good idea there might be labor abuse going on there. And it was a plane trip to a boat ride to a second boat ride to an island that can only be reached at certain times of the year.
And that’s where my colleagues did, indeed, find a slave island.
In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Koran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.
He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.
When it was over, he knelt to pray again, book-ending the rape with acts of religious devotion. “I kept telling him it hurts — please stop,” said the girl. “He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,” she said in an interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she escaped after 11 months of captivity.
The systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the group’s official communications, illuminate how the practice has been enshrined in the group’s core tenets.
The trade in Yazidi women and girls has created a persistent infrastructure, with a network of warehouses where the victims are held, viewing rooms where they are inspected and marketed, and a dedicated fleet of buses used to transport them.
A total of 5,270 Yazidis were abducted last year, and at least 3,144 are still being held, according to community leaders. To handle them, the Islamic State has developed a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery, including sales contracts notarized by the Islamic State-run Islamic courts. And the practice has become an established recruiting tool to lure men from deeply conservative Muslim societies, where casual sex is taboo and dating is forbidden.
A growing body of internal policy memos and theological discussions has established guidelines for slavery, including a lengthy how-to manual issued by the Islamic State Research and Fatwa Department just last month. Repeatedly, the Islamic State leadership has emphasized a narrow and selective reading of the Koran and other religious rulings to not only justify violence, but also to elevate and celebrate each sexual assault as spiritually beneficial, even virtuous.
“Every time that he came to rape me, he would pray,” said F, a 15-year-old girl who was captured on the shoulder of Mount Sinjar one year ago and was sold to an Iraqi fighter in his 20s. Like some others interviewed by The New York Times, she wanted to be identified only by her first initial because of the shame associated with rape.
“He kept telling me this is ibadah,” she said, using a term from Islamic scripture meaning worship.
“He said that raping me is his prayer to God. I said to him, ‘What you’re doing to me is wrong, and it will not bring you closer to God.’ And he said, ‘No, it’s allowed. It’s halal,’ ” said the teenager, who escaped in April with the help of smugglers after being enslaved for nearly nine months.
Calculated conquest
The Islamic State’s formal introduction of systematic sexual slavery dates to Aug. 3, 2014, when its fighters invaded the villages on the southern flank of Mount Sinjar, a craggy massif of dun-colored rock in northern Iraq.
Its valleys and ravines are home to the Yazidis, a tiny religious minority who represent less than 1.5 percent of Iraq’s estimated population of 34 million.
The offensive on the mountain came just two months after the fall of Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq. At first, it appeared that the subsequent advance on the mountain was just another attempt to extend the territory controlled by Islamic State fighters.
Almost immediately, there were signs that their aim this time was different.
Survivors say that men and women were separated within the first hour of their capture. In village after village, the men and older boys were driven or marched to nearby fields, where they were forced to lie down in the dirt and sprayed with automatic weapons fire.
The women, girls and children, however, were hauled off in open-bed trucks.
“The offensive on the mountain was as much a sexual conquest as it was for territorial gain,” said Matthew Barber, a University of Chicago expert on the Yazidi minority. He was in Dohuk, near Mount Sinjar, when the onslaught began last summer and helped create a foundation that provides psychological support for the escapees, who number more than 2,000, according to community activists.
Tried to escape
Fifteen-year-old F says her family of nine was trying to escape, speeding up mountain switchbacks, when their aging Opel overheated. She, her mother, and her sisters — 14, 7, and 4 years old — were helplessly standing by their stalled car when a convoy of heavily armed Islamic State fighters encircled them. “Right away, the fighters separated the men from the women,” she said. She, her mother and sisters were first taken in trucks to the nearest town on Mount Sinjar. “There, they separated me from my mom. The young, unmarried girls were forced to get into buses.”
F’s account is echoed by a dozen other female victims interviewed for this article. They described a similar set of circumstances even though they were kidnapped on different days and in locations miles apart.
F says she was driven to Mosul, about six hours away, where they herded them into the Galaxy Wedding Hall. And in addition to Mosul, women were herded into elementary schools and municipal buildings in the Iraqi towns of Tal Afar, Solah, Ba’aj and Sinjar City.
They would be held in confinement, some for days, some for months. Then, inevitably, they were sent in smaller groups to Syria or to other locations inside Iraq, where they were bought and sold for sex.
“It was 100 percent preplanned,” said Khider Domle, a Yazidi community activist who maintains a detailed database of the victims. “I spoke by telephone to the first family who arrived at the Directory of Youth in Mosul, and the hall was already prepared for them. They had mattresses, plates and utensils, food and water for hundreds of people.”
Detailed reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reach the same conclusion about the organized nature of the sex trade.
The girls described how three Islamic State fighters walked in, holding a register. They told the girls to stand. Each one was instructed to state her first, middle and last name, her age, her hometown, whether she was married, and if she had children.
For two months, F was held inside the Galaxy hall. “They laughed and jeered at us, saying ‘You are our sabaya.’ I didn’t know what that word meant,” she said. Later on, the local Islamic State leader explained it meant slave.
Religious tradition
In much the same way as specific Bible passages were used centuries later to support the slave trade in the United States, the Islamic State cites specific verses or stories in the Koran or else in the Sunna, the traditions based on the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, to justify their human trafficking, experts say.
Scholars of Islamic theology disagree, however, on the proper interpretation of these verses, and on the divisive question of whether Islam actually sanctions slavery.
“In the milieu in which the Koran arose, there was a widespread practice of men having sexual relationships with unfree women,” said Kecia Ali, an associate professor of religion at Boston University and the author of a book on slavery in early Islam. “It wasn’t a particular religious institution. It was just how people did things.”
Cole Bunzel, a scholar of Islamic theology at Princeton University, disagrees, pointing to the numerous references to the phrase “Those your right hand possesses” in the Koran, which for centuries has been interpreted to mean female slaves. He also points to the corpus of Islamic jurisprudence, which continues into the modern era and which he says includes highly detailed rules for the treatment of slaves.
“There is a great deal of scripture that sanctions slavery,” said Bunzel, the author of a research paper published by the Brookings Institution on the ideology of the Islamic State. “You can argue that it is no longer relevant and has fallen into abeyance. ISIS would argue that these institutions need to be revived, because that is what the Prophet and his companions did.”
One 34-year-old Yazidi woman, who was bought and repeatedly raped by a Saudi fighter in the Syrian city of Shadadi, described how she fared better than the second slave in the household — a 12-year-old girl who was raped for days on end despite heavy bleeding.
“He destroyed her body. She was badly infected. The fighter kept coming and asking me, ‘Why does she smell so bad?’ And I said, she has an infection on the inside, you need to take care of her,” the woman said.
Unmoved, he ignored the girl’s agony, continuing the ritual of praying before and after raping the child.
“I said to him, ‘She’s just a little girl,’” the older woman recalled. “And he answered: ‘No. She’s not a little girl. She’s a slave. And she knows exactly how to have sex.’ ” “And having sex with her pleases God,” he said.
SUMMARY: The Islamic State militants have imposed a brutal, ritualistic sex slave trade on thousands of women and girls who belong to the Yazidi sect, a persecuted religious minority. Rukmini Callimachi of The New York Times joins Judy Woodruff from Northern Iraq to discuss her reporting on the human toll of the Islamic State’s rule.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): We return now to the Islamic State group and its brutal tactics.
Much is known now about the group, also known as ISIL, and its high-profile beheadings of Westerners, mass executions of civilians and forced conversions. Less well-known is the extremist group’s horrific treatment of women and girls.
Last week, the United Nations reported thousands of women had been abducted by the group, some handed over to fighters as a reward or sold as sex slaves.
The NewsHour sent a crew to meet a 15-year-old girl, a member of the Yazidi sect, who was captured and held by the Islamic State before managing to escape. She now lives at a camp with others who’ve been displaced.
We withheld her identity for her and her family’s safety.
GIRL (through interpreter): They kept us in a house, the girls and the women. And then they killed all the men, including my brother.
GWEN IFILL: She and the abducted women were taken by truck east to a house in Mosul. There, they were ordered to convert to Islam. More kidnapped girls joined them.
GIRL (through interpreter): They separated the women and the girls. Some of the girls were taken by ISIL. They gave some of us to the guards and they sold some of us, too. And some were given as a gift.
If we didn’t do what they asked, they would have hit us. We did everything because we were threatened. We had to. They were very bad to the girls. They were doing bad things to the women, illegal things.
GWEN IFILL: That’s only one story.
To help us understand the depth and scale of the Islamic State’s treatment of women and girls, we turn to Manal Omar, acting vice president for the Middle East and Africa Center at the United States Institute of Peace, and David Jacobson, professor of sociology and founding director of the Citizenship Initiative on Civil Society and Conflict at the University of South Florida.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): And we travel now to Senegal, considered one of West Africa’s rising nations, home to a stable democracy with plans for universal health care and education, but where a troubling human rights crisis persists.
Kira Kay of the Bureau for International Reporting has the story.
KIRA KAY, Bureau for International Reporting: In a sandy courtyard in the city of Saint-Louis, a group of young boys begin their evening prayer studies. They are talibes, meaning students, and they have come 200 miles from their home villages to live with this Koranic master, called a marabout.
But their studies have only come at the end of a long, hard day’s work begging on the streets. You see Senegal’s talibes weaving in and out of traffic with their little yellow tubs or rusty cans. It’s dangerous, dirty work, up to 10 hours a day. Along with morsels of food, they are hoping for money. They owe their marabout a quota of about a dollar a day.
Begging is used to teach talibes humility and resilience. But this marabout admits it’s also a matter of simple economics.
ALIOUNE SECK, Koranic Teacher (through interpreter): You have to buy these books, medicine, water, electricity, everything you need in life. And the government doesn’t give it to us. That’s why they beg.
KIRA KAY: Talibe aid worker Issa Kouyate says what he sees is more sinister.
ISSA KOUYATE, Maison de la Gare: The society knows that these marabouts treat these boys like slavery. The government knows these marabouts treat these boys like slavery. Most of the marabouts abuse these boys.
KIRA KAY: The talibe system is unique to West Africa, and is rooted in centuries-old tradition, says Imam Mouhamed Cherif Diop.
MOUHAMED CHERIF DIOP, Coordinator, Tostan (through interpreter): It is assumed that I am not capable of giving my children their necessary education because of my affection, that I will tolerate things that I shouldn’t. And so we have entrusted our children to the marabouts, who live in another village, to create this distance to permit a good education.
